Accounting for Rapallo
The outbreak and aftermath of the Second World War meant that Ezra Pound’s political allegiances became undeniable, and writers who had been in Rapallo felt compelled to account for their proximity to Pound and their presence in Italy during Mussolini’s regime. This chapter interrogates the way that the poets of Rapallo represented Pound and Rapallo’s importance to their development, and it challenges critics’ convenient acceptance of these narratives. This chapter places particular importance on the lives of George Yeats, Dorothy Pound, and Brigit Patmore, challenging Virginia Woolf’s idea of the “totalitarian man” by showing the multifarious political alignments of Rapallo’s women.